On trying things and failing forward : Half-assing shit
"Never whistle while you're pissing" - Hagbard Celine
One of the problems of History as a set of narratives and bundled information is the affective certainty it affords Us, the contemporaries, the people of the future. We're taught History in a way that feels inevitable and straight-laced, moving forward or even cyclically but always in a way that is trackable to an extent and affords us the impression that the past is stuck in place which is why when the wider public catches up with where the actual fields of research are at it's pretty dizzying.
Histories are models that reduce the complexity of the world to a manageable and knoweable scale in accordance with the intent of those that write those histories : We don't need to know how many molecules were going left or right in the 1920s, we just need to know how the stock market was doing and who James Joyce was married to.
We don't need to know how many elephants were alive in 1846 but we might need to know the condition of the british workforce relative to the homeless population at that time as well as the date of the settlement of the Ottoman Empire's Vidin Eyalet.
In the Histories that are communicated to the general public, specific bits of information are paid attention to and related to one another to signify a measure of progression from situation 1 to situation 2, from one status quo to the next. There are multiple trajectories, multiple movements, processes, etc. But even those are reduced to points in time : moments, events.
Someone who takes the approach of directly affecting the game of politics rather than existing next to it as a spectator is likely to see past projects as mistakes, accidents, the drowned and starved seeds of failed futures : It's a western refrain that "the left" is too melancholic and navel-gazey about its failures.
Some of those someones will look at their favorite failed Grand Soir when everything could have been overturned, their favorite social gain that has been crushed, this or that project that needs to be brought back and could very well win it out this time if people were just "more involved".
To those people disappointed by History, it ends up seeming like people of the past were stupid, evil or both. Either way they half-assed it ; this or that project didn't go the whole way ethically or it lost momentum or it exhausted its ressources, it failed to adapt to its environment in accordance with its strategic orientation.
The (Boydian) term Orientation here is crucial, there's a difference between a simple change in method and a change in Orientation, an example :
Say I need to buy a specific product for a friend who's too sick to leave their bed, I go out on a holiday which means a number of the usual stores that sell the product are closed. So I make a detour to another one which sells something I know to be an equivalent to what my friend needed. It's not the exact same product but it'll have the same function. I have not taken the path my friend wanted, which they expressed to me this way :"Go to store X and get me product Y so that i can get better" , I have instead gone to store H and gotten product B, the Orientation of this change of path is still to help my friend get better by providing them with medicine and (hopefully) the result will be the same, this is just a detour but I'm still going in the same direction in terms of my concrete goal.
Now a change in Orientation would be me stopping in my tracks and not going to buy the product at all but going back home and explaining to my friend that given that store X is closed, we're going to have to figure out another way for them to get better or that maybe them getting better is not even a priority anymore, maybe they can handle being sick for a longer while till we figure out the situation ? That's a change in Orientation : the goal, that used to be about helping my friend, has changed as far as I'm concerned.
After they pester me with speeches about "excruciable pain" and "wtf is wrong with you" I cave in and go out to try again but come up empty-handed again because i've simply gone back to store X and found it closed still so I decide to buy something that looks like the product in some other store picked at random and go back to my friend with something that'll either kill them or not help them get better.
This is just one particular way of changing Orientation, here fostered by me being an uncaring asshole to my friend, i could've made changes because i was overwhelmed or because i was simply incapable of making good decisions, malice and carelessness are not the only way you can change the orientation of a project : In this imagined situation I am definitely being a piece of shit to my friend but what I'm trying to zero in on in making up this scenario is that we have here a situation where I have technically bought something in a store for my friend but haven't done so to help them get better : I've done it to get them off my back. I've changed the Orientation of the path while keeping the same method : I've half-assed shit.
The gist of it is : when I speak of "Half-assing" shit I'm pointing at decisive moments when the fulfilment of a task or project is done in a way that is no longer conducive to the original Orientation and purpose of such task or project, it ends up being a task or project for itself, carried on by the flimsy rationale that "something is better than nothing".
Then it follows that half-assing shit in politics has to do with the assumption that there'll be time later to fix the "good-enough" into "good", which happens rarely. There's no blank slate plateau to be attained : everything follows from the previous states of affairs, previous conditions, even as they accumulate and in accumulating see their dynamics change, their phases shift, their reach extend or retreat. If everything is connected then there's no end in sight.
If there ever was a political garden of eden that jumpstarted if not the terms at least the conditions that are described by the terms of those debates then that garden has been lost to time, trying to find it won't do any good, the time is now.
Half-assing shit comes from the fact that decisionmaking in a hostile environment is remarkably hard : making decisions while knowing others are taking decisions too without your permission is mindbreaking because it means you don't have all the variables in your hands. Before any action is to be taken you need to make a picture or map of the problem and you've got to act fast because if you don't you'll lose momentum.
We're always half-assing shit because we're tired and learn in the doing, not in the looking back. At a point of development in a project though you may end up ossifying its trajectory if you're not able to revise your models, methods and maps. If you can't re-establish the ethical drive or Orientation of the project then you'll lose the entire thing rather than just a motive or a justification : the endpoint will be something completely different from what you actually intended.
It's very important to remember that the purpose of a system is what it does, not what its maker really wants it to do in their heart of hearts.